Planners Work To Make System Go

December 28, 1986|By Reviewed by Robert E. Ansley Jr., Special to The Sentinel

For any land developer tripped by an environmentally protected bird, for any merchant caught in the wrong zoning district, or for any landlord cited for building violations, Richard Foglesong has news for you: city planners are your friends.

In his book, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s, Foglesong, who teaches political science at Rollins College, focuses on the formative years of city planning. He sees a pro-capitalist bias in these early planners, and that bias guided urban development to serve the free enterprise system.

By planners, Foglesong means architects, engineers, social workers, elected officials, citizen activists and even business executives who advocated intervening into the free-market process. Their purpose, usually under the flag of local government, was to provide the public with water works, town halls, roads, bridges and such items necessary to keep commerce humming. Planners also tried to regulate the market to ensure that businesses made compatible neighbors, for example, and that housing was safe and sanitary. These conditions could not be entrusted to a system driven by individual private actions, but they were necessary for the success of the system as a whole.

Foglesong cites several historical examples. The park movement, born with the completion of New York's Central Park in the 1850s, sought to distract the working class from its degradation and drudgery. Around 1910, the ''City Practical'' movement began to provide an economic and efficient system of land development and transportation, a necessity for a growing industrial economy. This academic book is hardly beach-side reading, but it is well-written and logically complete compared with similar works.

Foglesong offers an ideological interpretation of history with a Marxian perspective. Throughout the history of urban development, he writes, government intervention into the market, through city planning, has benefited capitalists -- owners and managers -- at the expense of workers.

One is tempted to ask, ''What's new?'' In any political and economic system, those in power reap most of the benefits. Most critical urban theorists tend to attribute a sinister motive to planners. But Foglesong rightly recognizes that in order to maintain political support, planners must operate within the system that is the only game in town. Ideology recedes in importance as planners earnestly work to ensure that the benefits and burdens of local development are shared as equitably as possible.